Thursday, December 12, 2013

“Mom, why I live on two planets?” asks
four-year-old Isa from the backseat.

We’re driving to Trader Joe’s for eggs.I know exactly what he means.

Isaias was born on the feast day of San Jerónimo, the patron
saint of our tiny town in Oaxaca, where the donkey cart is still a common form
of transportation and you can see most of the stars on a clear night.He learned
to walk on dirt roads and in alfalfa fields; he took his first solo steps while
we were helping our neighbors shell corn.He held hours-old chicks and rabbits in his hands and kissed a baby goat
on the lips one time.When we needed
eggs, we walked across the yard to the chicken enclosure, greeted the ladies by
name (Mago, Bárbara, Ramona, Macorina, and Darkwing, thank you very much), and
rooted around in the straw.

Now when we need eggs, we get in the car and drive to Trader
Joe’s along smooth paved streets.No
stars or farm animals in sight.Two planets.Yes, I know exactly
what he means, but hell if I have an answer for him.

*

Today I’m sitting in one of the five Starbucks (Starbuckses?)found within a mile radius of our house.I took a personal day at work because today,
almost seven months after we hugged him goodbye in the Oaxaca airport, my
husband is sitting in the American consulate in Ciudad Juarez, waiting for his
visa interview.He could be here,
theoretically, as soon as Tuesday, in time for Christmas.Or he could be put off for another two or three
or seven months.

It’s December 12, the feast day of the Virgin of Guadalupe.I try to see that as a good sign.I remember sitting on a plane, years ago,
having just said goodbye to my future husband for the first, but not the last,
time.Tears pouring down my face.As we flew out over Mexico City, the elderly
woman in the seat next to me patted my arm and said, “Ten fe, ten fe.”Have faith.All week I’ve been unconsciously repeating
her words to my husband via text and badly-connected phone calls:Ten fe,
mi amor, ten fe.Faith in what, I
don’t know.In Guadalupe, in our family,
in our story, in the journey, something.

﻿

﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿﻿The other day I was looking at a map of Mexico, trying to
put my husband’s presence in Ciudad Juarez into context, and suddenly saw the
country as a mermaid’s tail, poised for the downstroke that will propel her
towards the surface, where two worlds meet.Ciudad Juarez would be her navel.Her face, of course, is Guadalupe’s.My love will pass through the navel of the mermaid and then our family
will be complete again, and reborn as a family with two planets.

Why we live on two planets?If there’s not a reason, we’ll create one.

*

Christmas is coming, and four years old has got to be the age for Christmas magic.Isaias is excited, and full, of course, of
questions.

“Mom, why Santa not wanna be seen?”

“Mom, why Santa have panza
grande?”

“Mom, why Santa brings the presents?Why, Mom?When he bring them?”

It’s hard to talk about Santa to a kid who lives on two
planets.Isa’s first friends were the
three youngest children of our neighbor in Oaxaca, who lived in a house with a
dirt floor and shared one rusty tricycle between them.He knows that not all kids have new toys, not
all kids have adequate shoes or enough to eat or glass in their windows.I almost want to tell him the truth, but my
husband emails imploring me to not to.Ten fe.

When I get to the part about the eight flying reindeer, Isa
stops me.

“No, Mom.Santa have
wings.Santa can fly.”

We visit Santa at Christmas in the Park downtown.Isa asks for a monster truck, and I ask for
Papá’s visa, which makes Santa laugh.He’s
been trained, I notice, not to make any promises: “A monster truck!Why, that’s a fine idea!”

Afterwards, I ask Isa if Santa had wings.

“Yup.Red and green
wings like a butterfly.”

And that’s that.

*

So here I am in Starbucks, waiting for a phone call from
another planet, from the belly button of a mermaid with the solemn face of an
Aztec goddess.When will she break the
surface, when will we be three again?Santa’s
fluttering up there somewhere on butterfly wings, jolly and enigmatic, saying, “All
of you together for Christmas?That’s a
fine idea, very fine, indeed.”

Why we live on two planets, m’ijito?So our hearts will grow
big enough to fit them.So we’ll
learn to grow butterfly wings for flying and mermaid tails for diving deep. So we’ll learn to laugh and cry at the same time.So we’ll learn to have faith in something: in
life, in each other.So we’ll be able to
sit in a strip mall Starbucks in Silicon Valley at ten thirty a.m. and remember
the stars are up there somewhere.

UPDATE: Five minutes after I finished writing this, I got a
text.He’ll be here next week.

Thursday, September 26, 2013

A shocking number of years ago, when I went to Mexico for the first time, my host family asked if they could call me "Tere." I said I'd prefer Teresa, really. It's been so many years I've forgotten my host father's name, but I remember him saying in Spanish--maybe the first significant Spanish sentence I ever understood perfectly--"We want to call you Tere, because in Mexico we think it sounds cold to call someone by their full name." I thought that was weird, but I decided to go with it. I never expected to spend more than those few months in Mexico, anyway. Fast forward to this past school year, in Oaxaca. I knew I'd really started to assimilate because I reflexively shortened my students' names after the first couple of classes, if I felt warm towards them--"Fernando" to "Fer," "Mónica" to "Moni," "Karla" to "Karlita," "Adriel" to "Adri."

Now I'm in the U.S., teaching Spanish in an afterschool program as I search for the full-time job I know I will eventually find. I have a student named Victoria, a tiny, brilliant, little thing. I keep calling her "Vicky," and she corrects me, and I catch myself thinking, "But that sounds so cold!"

***

I told Ibis on gmail chat the other day--that's where our marriage mostly happens now--that it's weird being here, because people talk to Teresa, and Tere answers, and they don't even notice. It's a homecoming, technically, but it's also not. I'm sleeping in the room that I slept in when I was 11. I'm volunteering at the same agency I volunteered at in high school. There are memories everywhere, but I feel oddly detached from them.

Maybe I'm just old. But I feel like I'm also a little bit someone else. Someone who sometimes dreams in a language I didn't even understand back them. Someone who's done things so differently for so long that everything from Before seems about equally familiar, and alien.

Ibis said he understood, because people see him and talk to him and think he's the same without us, but he's not; he hasn't even gone anywhere yet, but he's not the same person, either.

***

﻿﻿

I'm volunteer teaching ESL to a group of Mexican women, mothers of young children enrolled in a nonprofit preschool. Many of them have been in the U.S. for years, but still speak only bits and pieces of English. They want to learn now because their kids speak to them in English and they don't know what they're saying.

﻿﻿Yesterday they told me two remarkable things: one, that they wish I could teach them every day, because I'm their favorite. That means a lot when you've applied to approximately five million jobs in the past four months and only some skeezy insurance company wants to hire you full time. ﻿They also told me that there's a flower called "Teresita." It's one we have in our garden in Oaxaca--my mother-in-law calls it "paragüitas," little umbrellas, but according to my students, it also shares the Spanish diminutive of my name. It's one I've never especially liked, but I guess I have to look at it differently now.

Monday, September 9, 2013

I thought that maybe what I've been doing wrong is trying to follow my heart too much. I thought that maybe my heart was trying to take me to a place that doesn't exist, some sort of misty-mountaintop-multicultural-Renaissance-Faire-magical-realism-fantasy-land where people wear lots of colorful flowing garments and struggle nobly for Truth and Love and Justice (a place something like this, or this, except maybe with fewer orgies). And that maybe, in order to ever have a chance at financial stability in the world we actually live in, I would have to opt into it and tell my hippie-dippy do-gooder little heart to shut the hell up.

So I started applying to jobs that didn't really interest me, and I got a job offer, and I couldn't stand the search anymore, so I spent the last couple weeks getting certified to sell insurance in the state of California.I've also been volunteer teaching ESL to a group of lovely Mexican immigrant women, and working on my little novel, and playing cars and trains and dinosaurs and penguins with Isaias, and drinking a little wine and a lot of coffee with some of my favorite ladies, and running three miles a day, and working on Ibis's visa paperwork, and reading books by Pema Chodron. I'M STILL ME. I thought, if I can do this stupid job and earn fifteen hundred bucks a week, and still be me in my free time, and send a big fat money order to my mother-in-law every week, and put something in the bank every week, that is good. I thought, I'll opt in a little, and just be present with the absurdity, and I'll learn something and it will be fine. It's what I need to do for my family, because what my family doesn't have is money. (Okay, and maybe I thought a little bit about how I could buy myself a couple pairs of really nice shoes, with fifteen hundred bucks a week.) So I passed my state licensing exam (with an 80% thanks very much. I can tell you all about double indemnity and nonforfeiture options, if you want....What, you don't want?) and started training last Thursday. I spent a couple hours with Cecilia (not her real name), watching her make calls. I thought, I'll be good at this, this isn't too bad. Then I spent Friday morning calling all Cecilia's "Spanish leads." She was thrilled to have someone who speaks Spanish and I was feeling pretty smug. Few people answered the phone. I set up one appointment, and Cecilia told me, "If we make that sale, I'll take you out to dinner!" A few more people answered, but weren't interested. Cecilia couldn't understand my end of the conversations, but she could see that I wasn't following the script. "Just stick to the script," she told me. "Don't answer their questions. If you answer their questions, you give them the control. You have to be in control."

I thought that was interesting. I filed that away to think about later.On Saturday morning, Cecilia had me making calls from home. First two, no answer. Third call, a woman--who'd supposedly been referred by her mother--told me angrily in Spanish, "I don't know who you people think you are, but some woman named Cecilia sold my mother something that she thought was from her union but it's not, and my mother doesn't even speak English, and she thought it was a one-time payment but they're taking money out of her account every month, and that Cecilia belongs in jail."I told her, "Thank you for telling me this, because if that's the way it is, I don't want this job. I just started, but if that's the way it is, I'm quitting." That's not in the script. She seemed surprised and grateful that I was a human being. She told me some more stuff and I thanked her again and hung up the phone and sat there. I looked at the sheet of phone numbers and realized I'd been speaking to Guadalupe. I cried. This is what I think now: maybe this is an isolated incident. But even if it is, if it had been my mother-in-law, or my grandmother-in-law....No. Not "if it had been." It might as well have been. Even if it means another month without a penny to send to Doña Charo, or put in the bank, or buy cute shoes, even if it was just that one lady who was tricked, I can't do it. Sunday night was the Guadalupe moon, the thinnest possible crescent. Today is Doña Charo's birthday, and I can't send her money, but I can honor her faith and integrity and honesty. I called Mr. Insurance Man and read from MY script. Feliz cumpleaños, suegra querida.I learned a lot from this experience.I learned that I don't particularly care about being in control, but that I sometimes cede control when it would actually be useful for me to take it. I learned that my desire to help people, while genuine, gets all tangled up with my desire to be nice and be liked, and that I have to put that aside sometimes.I learned that I can master the absurd grown-up world if I just try to do it. (Seriously, don't you want to know about nonforfeiture options? Annuities? Reduced paid-up whole life? Anyone?)I learned that if there's no connection, there's nothing. If time is money and people are leads, clients, or zeros, there's nothing. And I remembered all the people and places I'm connected to at the heart.And now that I'm connected again, I keep stumbling into the Eternal. I'm in the Silicon Valley, but it doesn't feel so distinct from that misty-mountaintop place anymore. Maybe I will never have cute shoes or a comfortable bank account. But I have a group of students who need me, a third of a novel that I'm pretty proud of, a son who wants to be a penguin when he grows up, a husband who is helping other people with their visa paperwork even as he waits for his own visa interview, friends who may even understand what I'm trying to say here, and a heart that I can go on listening to. Right now it sounds about like this:

Friday, August 9, 2013

Now, I’m here, and you’re there.Or you’re here and I’m there?That’s what it feels like.You’re here,
where we began, where we had our first date, where we got married, where I gave
birth to our son, where we planted our garden and made our life, and I’m there, somewhere else, somewhere you’ve never been.

Five years is the wood anniversary.We haven’t seen each other in almost two
months, and surely you’ve got wood to spare…but in terms of presents, I’m
buying you a secondhand wooden desk, for when you get here.And I’m asking you to buy and plant a little
tree for me, for when we get back there.That has a nice symmetry.

From the U.S. State Department, we got our present a couple
days early: your paperwork is moving along, and soon you'll be able to request your visa interview!Also, our
Fischer-Price counterparts had a romantic dinner date:

This would be a lot sexier if we had arms and stuff.

We met on a bus.You
proposed to me on another bus.Our
wedding changed venues with fewer than forty-eight hours to spare.We put 100,000 kilometers on our car in our
first four years of marriage. We've said goodbye and hello again in airports and bus terminals all over Mexico. Our relationship has always been defined by movement.

Tuesday, April 30, 2013

For their fortieth wedding anniversary, el Don y la Doña
both dye their graying hair a startling, shiny black.El Don looks small and fragile in his good
white guayabera.His wife has a good three inches and twenty
pounds on him; she’s solid and strong under her pink lace dress.They both wear the same slightly pained,
unreadable faces they wear to wakes, weddings, and the dinner table, even as
they walk into the hall to the cheers of their family and friends and the happy
welcoming notes from the band: DA-da DA-da da-di-da-di-DA-da!

Their three daughters and one daughter-in-law all wear short
fuchsia strapless dresses and silver heels; their son clashes in his light blue
guayabera.Ibis is their extra, honorary son;
they took him in when he was a lonely university student in a strange
city.

Their youngest daughter left home at nineteen to marry a man
everyone said would be the ruin of her. Their little girl was born missing a hand.She’s six years old now, and when
her doctor suggested fitting her for a prosthesis so she could have two hands,
she said, “But I already have one.”Tonight she’s wearing an orange and white
dress and a cascade of curls, and as her parents dance, she follows her small
cousins around, picking them up when they fall.

The middle daughter, a doctor, dances barefoot, and works
her way around the room, making sure she talks to everyone.Five years ago, she got married in a
blue-and-white church.Eight months
later, she got divorced.Now she says
she won’t leave her parents again for any man.To study maybe, but not to get married---besides, she says, she’s almost
thirty, who would want her?She dances
with abandon, laughing, her skirt working its way up her gorgeous legs.

The oldest daughter only in the past year, in her late
thirties, married a man with three teenagers from a previous relationship, and had a baby of her own.Everyone
said, “It’s about time.”Just a few months post-partum, her body is soft
and thick in the tight magenta dress.The next day, looking at photos, she says, “Ay, look at my enormous
belly!It’s that I had just eaten,” and
laughs.She’s never given much of a fuck
what people expect.

The daughter-in-law is orbited by her two little boys, who
wear magenta guayaberas they picked out themselves.She and I were married within months of each
other, and were pregnant at the same time.
Our husbands are best friends. Now we sit and chug beers and take turns herding the kids back into the hall when they head for the street. And she tells me that her husband has a
girlfriend on the side.That he comes
home at 2 a.m. or not at all.Later, an
aunt drags them both onto the dance floor and shoves them together.They each grab one of their sons, and dance without once looking at each other’s
eyes.

In the car on the way home, Ibis asks me, “Why do you think we’ve lasted?”

“Because we’re both such great communicators,” I say.(We’re not.)He laughs and punches me lightly on the thigh.

“No,” I say, “I think it’s because we both believe in our
story.You know?And we’re both too stubborn to give up on
such a great story.”

“Maybe,” he says. “It’s
a good story.”

We turn onto the dark highway.The pueblos are webs of light scattered
across the black valley.From here, it’s
a straight shot home.

Friday, April 26, 2013

I passed out cold while I was teaching on Tuesday
morning.(Turns out I’m anemic!So that’s fun.)One second I was saying, “Okay, chicos, close
your books and go back to your seats,” and the next moment, I wasn’t.For the time it took to go from standing to
lying on the floor with a desk on top of me, there was no I.

﻿﻿

﻿﻿When I opened my eyes, the sun was streaming through the
window, and one darling, bossy little girl was shouting at some of her
classmates, “Didn’t you even notice that La Teacher fell down?”No, no they didn’t.The teacher was gone and life went on.

I’ve been doing some work at Matador U recently, and one
comment I find myself making over and over on student writing is, “The subject
of almost every sentence is ‘I’.See how
the focus changes if you go from ‘I notice a bird flying’ to ‘A bird flies’?”

Soon I won’t be here.Soon I’ll be somewhere else.And
here, the shadows will still play over the hills.Chicks will hatch, and some will die, and
some will live to peep and scratch and chase bugs.The chayotal will send tendrils racing up the
adobe wall, if the damn rabbit doesn't chew through them first.The rain clouds will roll in, and sometimes pour and sometimes leave the hard red soil thirsty.My little students will dance and trade tazos
and tell Pepito jokes and learn the English past tense from someone else.The good folks in immigration will make some
other gringa cry.

I won’t be here to see or notice or observe, and it won’t
really matter.

See how the focus changes, Teresa?See how everything important goes on, even
when you’re unconscious or far away?

Wednesday, April 3, 2013

In La Colonia nothing seems to change.The generations slowly shift, but today’s
18-year-olds cook over wood fires and have too many babies, just like their
great-grandmothers did.There’s no cell
phone signal—there’s one phone in town, in the centro; if you get a call, they announce it over the loudspeaker
and you run.Everything revolves around
corn.Tortilla is a verb: tortillar.

The mango grove has been there as long as my mother-in-law,
the indomitable Doña Charo, can remember, on a remote piece of land that
belongs to nobody. She came
here with her brothers and sisters when there was nothing to eat
at home.The huge mango trees rustle and
whisper in the breeze just as they must have forty years ago, when Doña Charo
was Chayito, a girl with long golden ringlets and an empty belly.

One thing has changed, on this trip: the road between the
town of Cintalapa and La Colonia, which had always been dirt, is paved: a long
straight avenue planted up the dividing strip with magueys.The avenue is named for a rich local
man.It’s a name Doña Charo recognizes:
when she was fourteen, and this man was in his thirties, he wanted to marry
her.

She was beautiful, and she had nothing: no money, no father,
a step-father who drank and hit, a steady stream of younger brothers and
sisters to take care of.

This
wealthy man told fourteen-year-old Chayito that he would set her up like a
queen, that she would never want for anything.She said no.He spoke to her
mother, offered her money.I imagine
Doña Catalina—pregnant, probably, patting out tortillas in the smoky adobe
kitchen—saying, “M’ija, marry him, go on.” Thinking that it sounded like a damn good offer.Chayito said no, and no again.“Nunca
me voy a casar con un hombre de por acá,” she said.I’ll never marry a man from here.

When she had a chance, she left.She’s not a queen, not even close.She’s wanted for things, since she left La
Colonia.But her life is her own.

The mango trees reach and moan and whisper.“I never imagined I would come to this place
with my son and my grandson,” Doña Charo says, peeling a green mango.She’s not blonde anymore, but she’s still
beautiful.The most beautiful.

“I have such nice memories of these trees,” she says, “but I
don’t have a taste for mangoes anymore.”

His classmates laughed. Many of them are, themselves, brown. All of them have family members who are brown. And they laughed.

Isaias insisted. He would not color his papito the wrong color. His papito is the color of chocolate. Finally his teacher said that he was right, and told the children not to laugh. And he colored his papito brown.